Just Launched New Site - First Steps to Get it to Rank?
-
Good Morning Mozzers...
We just recently launched a brand new site and now the fun part begins: trying to get it to appear in the SERPS.
I'm wondering if you guys can share your best and most proven secrets/tricks to get brand new sites to rank in Google.... For example, what are the first directories you add the site to? What are some links you try and aquire first?
Looking for some tips and ideas for a brand new site.
Thanks in advance.
-
Thanks for your advice --- very very helpful -- greatly appreciated.
-
Hi Prime,
On the presumption that your onsite SEO is complete and your content is indeed excellent I would do the following.My no1 tip on getting your site index'd would simply to be to simply fetch as google and submit the main page. Set up your analytics and then focus on your local SEO. Do all your local listings, and basically everything moz recommends about local SEO. This should be plenty for you to be index'd.
Then I would stop thinking about "Link Building" in the traditional sense.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking
links = ranks = clicks = visitorsinstead try to think of it as
publicity = visitors = natural links = ranks = more visitorsTake some of your excellent content and begin marketing it. Get social media happy, g twitter, facebook, google+ and every other platform you can think of active. Social media activity is a good ranking factor, use it. Get active on niche forums, other niche websites and begin spreading your brand. By this I don't mean spamming forums with links to your website I mean offering excellent advice and relevant links where appropriate. Ensure profiles are complete with links to your website so when you have helped someone and they check you out they find their way back. If you have a marketing budget get some PPC to begin driving traffic, and look at other forms of advertising. If your content really is excellent odd links will begin to sprout up.
This achieves 2 things. It spreads your brand and builds relationships and reputations within your niche.
I would do this from anywhere from 2 to 6 months. Asking for links as a new website even if your content is top notch is hard and has a very low success rate. Asking for a link from a website you have spent 2-6 months supporting and having a presence on is a lot easier. Especially if you can design a piece of content you know that site needs. Is a certain question being asked a lot on a website? Make something providing the answer then approach them with the content.
Alternatively make the first move. Found another website that cracking in your niche but not directly competitive? Review them, award them, and tell them about it. Websites like to brag when they receive a 5* award or review and will often link back to it.
Don't act to receive a link, act to advertise your brand.
I apologise if this isn't a direct answer to "how to link build". But i wanted to stress the difficulty of link building, even more so for new sites. I would rather spend 6 months of time on social media, building relationships and working myself into a position into the niche to ask for a high authority link with some success rather than spend 6 months of NO responses from link requests.
-
Link building for any site is a huge subject - certainly not something you can cover here.
However, your best links are going to come from amazing content / linkable assets. If you have something that your niche are going to enjoy reading, then you will find links will happen.
If you are happy performing outreach, you can speed this process up and let key influencers know what you have, but tread carefully... If you just started to Tweet someone you have never spoken to before and asked for links, it can be taken badly and you can ruin your chances for the future.
Here are a few resources to read:
-- MOZ beginners guide to link building -- Backlinkto -- Point Blank SEO -- Post Penguin Link Building (Disclaimer... This is my site)
Hopefully you will get some good pointers from there.
-Andy
-
ok - great advice on the blogging outreach attempts, will definitely try that.
Any other tips/suggestions?
I'll report back on how all of the tips and suggestions worked out.
Thanks
-
I don't know what market your website is in but maybe there are a few blogs/news websites that would write a small article about how your website is new and launching, maybe you have something unique that people will be happy to share with their readers?
It might be worth trying to come up with an outreach strategy and target website owners directly about how your new website is so amazing, and new, and useful etc.
Local directories are good to start with but I don't think its as easy as there being a specific set of link building tips that people run through when they first launch (although if I'm wrong I would love to know them!!).
-
Hey Andy,
I agree with everything that you just said, but after all on page optimization is complete, and we are confident that our content is excellent (we are constantly adding new, high quality content), where do you begin in the link building world?
Got to start somewhere, niche directories may not help for link purposes, but at least they will drive targeted traffic ...
But I'm looking for ideas on how to get started with link building for new websites.
Thanks again
-
Hi,
...what are the first directories you add the site to? What are some links you try and aquire first?
I wouldn't be starting here. Directories for the most part are pretty useless, unless you are adding yourself to a niche / local one that might help with specifics.
Follow all best practices with your site. Ensure that you have thoughtful and well phrased page titles that describe the page. Make sure your content is amazing (average isn't going to cut the mustard). Spend additional time to ensure this happens. Don't fall into the trap of overusing keywords and make sure your site is well configured to avoid duplicate pages.
There is so much to cover here, that I would suggest you spend some time reading over the MOZ Beginners Guide. This will give you a good grounding into what you should be doing.
-Andy
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
Fixing up poorly performing eCommerce SIte with content? First things first..
I had a small site that was performing well enough for me for 6 years--nice source of extra family income. It was a very out of date platform (1990's) and I moved it to Big Commerce in December. Since then visits and sales have just plummeted. It has died and I am sad. I want to remain positive. It's a viable niche product line, I have tons of quality inventory, my site platform is current. I am a good writer and am willing to add content if it will help. From what I can determine apart from technical issues I may not know about I think I suffer from THIN CONTENT. I want to pretend I'm opening a new business and start over in today's environment. I have had bad experiences with two SEO consultants (one ripped me off financially, the other gave me advice that hurt me) so I have no choice but to educate myself. I got started in ecommerce back in 1998 with the help of many wonderful kind people on forums so I'm turning to this resource once again. What would you do first if you were me especially to get some revenue flowing asap? I need help. I need to know if there is hope or if I should liquidate at the nearest swap meet 😉 Thanks! decorativedishes.net
Technical SEO | | ddktt1 -
URLs in Greek, Greeklish or English? What is the best way to get great ranking?
Hello all, I am Greek and I have a quite strange question for you. Greek characters are generally recognized as special characters and need to have UTF-8 encoding. The question is about the URLs of Greek websites. According the advice of Google webmasters blog we should never put the raw greek characters into the URL of a link. We always should use the encoded version if we decide to have Greek characters and encode them or just use latin characters in the URL. Having Greek characters un-encoded could likely cause technical difficulties with some services, e.g. search engines or other url-processing web pages. To give you an example let's look at A) http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%B1which is the URL with the encoded Greek characters and it shows up in the browser asB) http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ελβετία The problem with A is that everytime we need to copy the URL and paste it somewhere (in an email, in a social bookmark site, social media site etc) the URL appears like the A, plenty of strange characters and %. This link sometimes may cause broken link issues especially when we try to submit it in social networks and social bookmarks. On the other hand, googlebot reads that url but I am wondering if there is an advantage for the websites who keep the encoded URLs or not (in compairison to the sites who use Greeklish in the URLs)! So the question is: For the SEO issues, is it better to use Greek characters (encoded like this one http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%B1) in the URLs or would it be better to use just Greeklish (for example http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvetia ? Thank you very much for your help! Regards, Lenia
Technical SEO | | tevag0 -
How do I get my keyword rankings to update?
My keyword rankings did not update. It says updates every Thursday and the last update shows as Aug 23 (which was the original update). Any idea why this would happen and how I can get the updated info?
Technical SEO | | pattersonla1 -
301 Redirect How Long until the juice passes through to new site
Hi Guys, Following on from a question i asked last week in regard to a 301 http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-have-no-ranking I was thinking that i had some kind of issue on the site, although i have gone over it with a fine tooth comb i cannot find any issue's and from the amount of reads the thread has had im sure if there was something obvious it would have been pointed out. So i am quite confident the 301 from site A to site B is fine and working as intended, so my question is how long should it take until the juice is passed From site A to Site B as its 9 weeks now and still down 85% on traffic and even text for my home page if copied into the search bar don't bring up my site Bing is fine and did not see any real traffic drops but Google is not giving me back the rankings i had prior Whenever i have done a 301 before the rankings pretty steady and i see no real loss in rankings but this time ... painful all changes in WMT made
Technical SEO | | kellymandingo
Canonical tag implemented
all Pages 301 and correct 200 response from the targeted page
Sitemap Updated
Many Links Changed from Old site to new (including DMOZ)
no Robots text Blocking directory's
Google crawling freely and regularly The strange thing is New content is indexed immediately and ranks easily, I added a page for my service in my local area and went straight to position 5 in Google however old existing content wont move, I tracked 150 keywords only 4 are top 75 Don't know what else to do so any advice would be much appreciated PS site is around 17k pages Paul0 -
Does duplicate content on word press work against the site rank? (not page rank)
I noticed in the crawl that there seems to be some duplicate content with my word press blog. I installed a seo plugin, Yoast's wordpress seo plugin, and set it to keep from crawling the archives. This might solve the problem but my main question is can the blog drag my site down?
Technical SEO | | tommr10 -
I want to create a new web site, I have to choose between:....
Hello I want to create a new web site, I have to choose between: 1/ using one of my former domain name that dates about 10 years ago, which has a lot of backlink (PageRank 4) but without the anchor text of the new area of activity that I want to launch ... 2/or purchase a new domain name with two keywords which I want to be positioned in the first place: P Which method is better for good and quickly results ? Thank you for your help
Technical SEO | | Moncer0